Nathaniel Solley/Staff

About a dozen protesters continue to occupy the steps and facade of the Berkeley post office despite ongoing requests from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to move off of the post office’s property.

Protesters have been occupying the space for nearly two weeks in a last-ditch effort to prevent the sale of the post office to private developers. The investigators, federal agents dedicated to enforcing Postal Service regulation, warned protesters verbally and provided them with the service’s rules governing conduct on Postal Service property on Friday. Agents have not attempted to forcefully remove the protesters but continue to monitor the scene.

Currently, the protest is being held by four or five activists handing out pamphlets and talking to passers-by as well as a few loiterers who say they will remain despite the threat of law enforcement.

“They’ve threatened to remove us, but we’re still holding our positions and staying there around the clock,” said Mike Wilson of Strike Debt Bay Area, an advocacy group that is organizing the protest.

Augustine Ruiz, a regional Postal Service spokesperson, said that he was concerned that the protest was impeding customers from entering and exiting the facility safely and expressed further concern regarding reported vandalism. Ruiz said that the Postal Service would enforce safety regulation but not stop the protest itself.

“There’s nothing wrong with public congregation, and there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing, as long as they’re doing it peacefully,” Ruiz said. “We’re not arguing the fact that they have a right to do what they’re doing — we’re saying there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.”

William Rogers, acting city manager for the city of Berkeley, wrote in a memo on Saturday that Berkeley Police Department will not intervene unless a threat to public safety arises during enforcement action by Postal Service police.

A rally is planned for Saturday, when protesters will march between FedEx, UPS and UC Berkeley’s Blum Center, demonstrating against companies and individuals who are involved in the sale. Protesters cite FedEx and UPS as prospective buyers and allege that Richard Blum — who is chair of the board of CBRE, the corporate real estate company brokering the sale — could make a personal profit if the post office is sold.

Contact Simon Greenhill at sgreenhill@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @simondgreenhill.

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Nathaniel Solley/Staff

Approximately 20 to 30 protesters have been camping overnight since Saturday to fight the sale of the historic 99-year-old post office on Allston Way in Downtown Berkeley.

Even though the U.S. Postal Service remains firm on its final decision to sell the building on Thursday, activists say they are rallying to raise awareness of the larger issue of turning publicly controlled property to private ownership. The overnight protesters followed a rally on Saturday afternoon, which drew around 100 attendees.

Mike Wilson of Strike Debt Bay Area, one of the two main local groups spearheading the protest, says that activists have given up on trying to stop the sale through the petitions and appeals process.

“The only other method we can think of is to show a physical commitment to holding this space,” Wilson said.

Since Saturday night, between 20 to 30 people — mostly middle-aged Berkeley residents — have been camping in tents pitched on the steps outside the post office. Community members cook and donate food for protesters. As pedestrians walk by, activists stationed at tables talk and answer questions in hopes of garnering support for their campaign.

Wilson said no police officers have told the activists to take down their tents or vacate the premises so far.

“We appreciate that they feel that strongly about the post office,” said Augustine Ruiz, a regional Postal Service spokesperson, of the protesters pitching tents.

Despite his understanding of protesters’ concerns, Ruiz said that keeping ownership of the entire 57,000-square-foot building is not economically viable, because the Postal Service only needs 4,000 square feet due to declining mail volume. According to Ruiz, the Postal Service’s first preference is to sell the building to an outside owner and lease the front section for the continued use by the Postal Service.

Protesters are pointing to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 as the cause of many of the Postal Service’s financial problems. The act forces the service to prefund its retiree health benefit fund for the next 75 years by making payments of $5.5 billion a year until 2016.

The act is just one of several causes of the Postal Service’s financial troubles, Ruiz said, also citing the decline in first-class mail as a reason for cost-cutting measures.

Wilson said that members of his organization will continue to protest after the building is sold by picketing prospective construction companies and businesses involved with the redevelopment.

“We are going to make sure that people know that we still consider this ours — even after it’s sold and redeveloped,” Wilson said. “So it’s not going to be a good place for business.”

Some city officials have also been vocal about their opposition to the sale. Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin put forward a proposal for a zoning overlay on the historic district to restrict it to civic, community or cultural use only. If passed by the planning commission, the City Council would be able to vote on the proposal in the future.

“It’s a good idea,” said Harvey Smith, a Save the Berkeley Post Office spokesperson, of Arreguin’s proposal. “The (building) is in the public sector which we all paid for with our taxes and should remain that way.”

Contact Grace Wu at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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Joe Wright/File

The United States Postal Service announced Monday that it has officially approved the relocation of its Downtown Berkeley branch due to the organization’s need to reduce its current multibillion-dollar deficit.

Serving the Berkeley community since 1914, Downtown Berkeley’s main post office is one of the city’s historical landmarks listed in the National Register of Historic Places and contains two pieces of Works Progress Administration artwork. Monday’s announcement means that the Postal Service will be selling the property and moving operations from the historic building to another location nearby, which has yet to be determined.

The decision comes after the Postal Service announced in June of last year that it intended to relocate the Downtown branch as part of a nationwide strategy to consolidate up to 140 locations by 2013 and another 89 by 2014. The Postal Service has been facing a nationwide $25 billion deficit over the past four years, according to Postal Service spokesperson Augustine Ruiz.

“It doesn’t mean we’re going to go out of business,” Ruiz said. “All we’re saying is that we don’t need a 57,000-square-foot building anymore when we only need 4,000. It makes good business sense.”

Since the plan to relocate the post office was revealed, residents and city officials have opposed it.

Local groups, such as Save the Berkeley Post Office, have held several protests outside the building, and the mayor and several Berkeley City Council members created the Post Office Subcommittee last July to lobby the USPS.

“I’m really disappointed,” said Mayor Tom Bates. “It’s a beautiful building. We talked to the Postal Service about the need to keep the building public, but they just seem to have it in their minds that they want to sell it no matter what.”

According to the statement, there is a 15-day appeal period during which anyone can send a letter to the Postal Service, which will review the complaints prior to making a final decision.

Bates and Arreguin both voiced plans to take part in appealing the decision. A special City Council session may be held to organize a collective letter of appeal from the city on April 30, Arreguin mentioned.

“We’re going to appeal, but I think the chances of the appeal going through are about one out of 20,” Bates said.

Save the Berkeley Post Office also intends to hold a protest against the decision and has been talking with lawyers about the possibility of challenging it legally, according to Harvey Smith, spokesperson for Save the Berkeley Post Office.

“In the end, even if the outcome of the appeal is not favorable, what we can certainly do as a city government is to work with the USPS to make sure who buys the building uses it for a positive use,” Arreguin said.

Contact Alison Fu at afu@dailycal.org.

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Lance Knobel/Courtesy

Berkeley City Councilmember Gordon Wozniak is garnering national media attention for his recent suggestion of an email tax.

The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and the Huffington Post have all recently covered Wozniak’s proposal of a tax on email that could help in generating funds to aid the U.S. Postal Service, which is currently experiencing financial difficulties.

“It must have been a slow day in the media,” Wozniak said regarding his recent media attention.

Wozniak has since faced significant backlash to his email tax proposal, receiving a fair amount of hate mail for the idea.

However, Wozniak is not the first to consider an Internet tax. The “bit tax” was first proposed by Arthur Cordell during a talk at Harvard Law School in 1997 and was also explored later by the United Nations, according to Wozniak.

Wozniak believes that a bit tax or email tax could serve as a measure to effectively gain revenue that the government needs to support other public works in addition to the Postal Service, such as education and health care.

“(If you consider) the terabits of data per second sent around the world, that’s billions, trillions of bits — even a small tax would generate substantial revenue,” Wozniak said.

Under the Internet Tax Freedom Act passed in 1998, it is currently illegal to place a tax on Internet usage. The act will expire in 2014, and it will be up to Congress to decide whether or not the act should be renewed indefinitely. There are presently no plans for a federal Internet tax to be implemented. Nevertheless, Wozniak remains hopeful.

“The idea is out there,” Wozniak said. “Things could change in the future, but it’d have to be changed on a federal level.”

Contact Jennie Yoon at jyoon@dailycal.org.

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Just in case you haven’t managed to fully comprehend the meaning of the word “sequester” over the last few months – and years, really – of partisan bickering, it has massive financial implications for the entire country, and more importantly, Berkeley. While Mitt Romney’s favorite “Sesame Street” hasn’t been put to rest, – yet – many people including Berkeley City Councilmember Gordon Wozniak are scrounging for cash to fund the programs they so love. We wouldn’t dare bore you with the financial jargon and technical details, partly because we can’t get through the dense material ourselves, but we’d like to draw your attention to one service in particular: the United States Postal Service.

The good old USPS has been around for … well technically by name, only a little over thirty years. But of course, it has traced its roots to the formation of the country. Most Cal students have an inherent appreciation for the USPS, the entity that makes online shopping and pseudo-doorstep delivery possible. The postmaster general has already planned the destruction of next-day delivery – tragic for all Netflix subscribers and wants to add an entire cent to the fare of first-class mail. If that failed engineering test had you on the verge of dropping out of Cal to become a mailman, think again. Almost 100,000 people are going to be getting the proverbial axe soon enough. And all of that was before the sequester, which would likely result in the doomsday scenario: more cuts from government funding.

Though these are stressful times for the USPS indeed, the aforementioned Wozniak has appeared to let the stress get the better of him. His genius proposal: a tax on email. Totalitarian mutterings aside, Wozniak has proposed that each bit – or little piece of data, for all you non-computer science majors out there – have a fee attached to it. To give you a comparison spectrum, your average Microsoft Word document would take upwards of 200,000 of those little guys. Now, the tax being proposed is by no means outlandish: a cent per gigabit, which is a billion bytes. Though the average reader may cringe at the very idea of having a tax on something they have come to acknowledge as a birthright, it’s not actually quite so bad by the numbers. On average, your Gmail account is capable of storing 10 gigabytes. So assume you were to fill your whole email account within the span of a year – which most people probably won’t manage within five years, let alone one – you’d still only be coughing up 80 cents, which is probably your daily allotment to that nice homeless lady down the street.

Of course, when the scale is adjusted to a national level, where millions of people and companies with large list-servers use email services, the profits could be monumental. Not to mention that it would have the side benefit of stopping those annoying penis enlargement advertisements that somehow manage to get through your spam filter every now and then. A lot of this collective revenue would go back to the real American way of doing things – by paper and pen, through the real airwaves rather than the virtual ones.

There has been a large backlash to this idea, for many reasons. Not only is something like this prohibited under Clinton’s Internet Tax Freedom Act – which has a lifespan until late 2014 – it’s near impossible to enforce. And this could be a “gateway” policy: what’s to stop an eventual tax on AIM, or god forbid, Facebook messages? How dare you, Wozniak? They may take our money, but they’ll never take our Facebook accounts!

Follow Uday on Twitter at @mehtakid

Image source: Warner Bros.

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Gracie Malley/File

Residents filled the Berkeley City Council Chambers to voice their concerns about the relocation of the Downtown Berkeley post office during a public meeting Thursday.

The U.S. Postal Service expressed interest in relocating its 97-year-old Downtown Berkeley branch to help offset declining revenues from a decrease in first-class mail and the increased costs of a 2006 congressional mandate to prefund retiree health benefits.

First-class mail volume is down 25 percent from its 2006 peak, according to the Postal Service’s “Plan to Profitability” presentation.

“When you lose that much volume, a lot of revenue goes with it,” said Augustine Ruiz, Postal Service spokesperson.

The plan to relocate the branch at Allston Way was proposed in June, as the current 57,000-square-foot location is too big for the Postal Service’s needs. Under the plan, retail services would be moved to a yet-to-be-determined location of about 4,000 square feet, and postal carriers would be moved to a nearby annex. There would be no service interruptions to postal customers, Ruiz said.

“It would be unfortunate if it closed, and we don’t know what it would be used for if it were sold,” said Councilmember Jesse Arreguin.

Arreguin said that he plans to propose other options for the use of the building to the Postal Service, including partly leasing the building, allocating the front of the building for post office retail space and having another tenant use the rest of the building.

“Is it really cost savings to sell a building you own and lease a building you don’t own?” Arreguin said.

“This is an amazing legacy that was paid for by our parents and grandparents,” said Harvey Smith, part of the Committee to Save the Berkeley Main Post Office. “It’s stripping part of our national heritage.”

Ruiz noted that whatever happens to the building — which is on the National Register of Historic Places — it must adhere to the proper historical requirements.

The date of the next public meeting has yet to be determined and will be preceded by a 15-day advance notice. After the meeting, the public will have an additional 15-day comment period before recommendations are sent to Postal Service offices in Washington, D.C. After the comment period, Postal Service representatives in Washington will make the final decision about the relocation. There will be a 15-day appeal period following the decision.

Still, Ruiz said that this will not be a hasty decision.

“We need to make sure we do our due diligence,” he said.

Contact Mitchell Handler at mhandler@dailycal.org.

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Nicole Lim/Staff

The selling off of the U.S. Postal Service properties is the latest example of the movement to corporatize what’s left of the public sector. It comes in a long line of privatization efforts — from shrinking the public school system to expanding the prison system to contracting out the U.S. military. UC students have firsthand experience of what this means. If the trend continues, it won’t be long before UC Berkeley carves a corporate logo on Founders’ Rock.

The proposed sale of the nearly century-old Downtown Berkeley Main Post Office is yet another close-to-home example of the public surrender to corporate America. Berkeley’s is just one of hundreds of post offices now up for sale around the country, albeit exceptional in its design.

Modeled on the early Renaissance Foundling Hospital in Florence, the Main Post Office is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Like many other public buildings around the nation, it is adorned with art commissioned by the New Deal, a decade-long federal program that put millions to work during the Great Depression, including artists, writers, musicians and actors. The taxes of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents paid for those artworks, as well as the building and its land. They belong to all of us.

The sale of the Downtown Berkeley post office else makes no fiscal sense for the U.S. Postal Service, but it does for a real estate broker. Why would any business give up free space in a beautiful Downtown building to rent another commercial space nearby?

Enter the world’s largest real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis, which stands to profit handsomely through its exclusive contract to sell post offices nationwide. CBRE recommends to the Postal Service which buildings it should sell. Perhaps not coincidentally, many those up for sale are in the nation’s most expensive real estate markets.

Like Social Security, the Postal Service does not contribute to the federal deficit, since its budget is independent of the federal budget. In 2006, Congress manufactured the Postal Service’s deficit by requiring it to prefund future retirees’ health benefits for 75 years over a 10-year period. This means postal workers unborn must have their benefits paid for now. No other public or private agency is required to do this. The intent of Congress appears to be to so throttle the Postal Service as to kill it.

Granted, postal volume has decreased due to email and the depressed economy. However, the Postal Service still moves more than 150 billion pieces of mail each year — hardly the image of a dead institution. This is not to deny that the Postal Service must change to compete in the digital age, but millions of Americans still depend on the Postal Service.

Congress and Postal Service management blame the Internet and the budget deficit for dismantling the Postal Service and killing thousands of living-wage jobs. In reality, Americans are being distracted from the theft of what they paid for and own. After all, the Postal Service is one of the few government agencies authorized by a Constitution that nowhere mentions corporations.

Those ideologically opposed to the public sector and who hope to profit from its demise are killing it incrementally — an increase in fees, a reduction in service, the sale of a public building that represents civic life. Advocating the continuation of the service for which the Main Post Office was designed is part of a national struggle to defend our common heritage.

That inheritance is being stolen before our eyes. Learn more by going to savethepostoffice.com, and join the growing national grassroots fight to stop service cutbacks and preserve living-wage postal jobs for our communities.

Harvey Smith is president of the National New Deal Preservation Association and an organizer for the Committee to Save the Berkeley Main Post Office.

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Gracie Malley/Staff

A new campaign in Berkeley is aiming to convince the U.S. Postal Service to rescind plans to sell the building that houses the city’s main post office in Downtown Berkeley.

About 90 protesters gathered Tuesday on Allston Way at the steps of the post office to voice support for a Berkeley City Council recommendation that asks the postal service to rethink its plan to sell the historic building. The vote to adopt the resolution — originally scheduled to take place after the demonstration on Tuesday night — will occur at a special council meeting on July 31.

Participants of the protest, including the Committee to Save the Berkeley Main Post Office, point to trends toward increasing privatization of government services and infrastructure.

“If you get on the BART and someone lifts your wallet, you get angry,” said Harvey Smith, an organizer for the committee. “Well, (the post office) is a lot more than your wallet.”

Smith and others would like to keep the building, which has notable historic and architectural value, in the public sector. Completed in 1915, the post office is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and contains two pieces of Works Progress Administration artwork, including a mural of early Berkeley history by Suzanne Scheur.

But Postal Service spokesperson Augustine Ruiz insisted the building is here to stay.

“The building has to remain as is, under the guidelines of the (national register),” Ruiz said. “There is a lot that can be done with a building like this and still maintain its historical significance.”

The council recommendation also suggests the possibility of the city purchasing the building.

“I think what’s important is working to try to ensure that the building is used for a public purpose,” said Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who authored the recommendation with Councilmember Susan Wengraf. “The city needs to play a leadership role in finding a buyer who will put forth a public use of the space.”

Arreguín added that he expects the resolution to pass but hopes the postal service will be more forthcoming with its plans regarding the building and the procedure for public input.

“We need to get more information,“ he said. “We need to have more of a dialogue.”

The Postal Service has been criticized for a lack of transparency in other communities facing similar consolidations or sales. However, Ruiz said the Postal Service is obligated to hold a public hearing about the sale, which will take place at a future City Council meeting.

The Committee to Save the Berkeley Post Office has called into question the role of UC Regent Richard Blum, who is the chairman of the board for CB Richard Ellis, the firm that won the contract to serve as the real estate services provider for the Postal Service sales.

Gray Brechin, another organizer for the committee and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, called Blum’s position “an enormous conflict of interest.”

But the real estate firm did not take any part in the nationwide plan to sell off Postal Service property, according to Ruiz.

The sale is part of the U.S. Postal Service’s modified network consolidation plan, which aims to save the organization $1.2 billion annually by consolidating up to 229 mail processing locations over the next two years. According to Ruiz, mail operations in Berkeley would move to the Berkeley Destination Delivery Unit at 1150 8th St., and a smaller, alternate retail space would be leased in the downtown area.

Overall, the Postal Service is facing a $14 billion deficit this year alone. In 2006, Congress passed an act requiring the Postal Service to prepay health care benefits by 2016 to all current employees, as well as employees expected to retire in the next 75 years.

The Postal Service would be the only government agency to generate a modest profit if not for the mandate, which costs it $5.5 billion annually, according to Ruiz.

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The plot of land owned by the Postal Service is approximately 2.2 acres on 8th and Harrison streets — which neighbors the service’s main processing center — and the service plans to sell it for $2.3 million, according to Postal Service spokesperson Augustine Ruiz. However, the land does not actually contain a building and currently sits empty.

Buyers for the plot of land have not been determined, according to Ruiz.

“(The plot of land) was first acquired by (Postal Service) in case there was a need for expansion,” Ruiz said.

He also said because the Postal Service is going through a financial crisis, it has been developing cost containment strategies throughout the 2012 fiscal year, including selling excess property that is no longer needed, such as the main post office in downtown Berkeley.

The Postal Service is currently planning to move its letter carriers from the main post office building on Allston Way to the processing center neighboring the plot of land to be sold, Ruiz said. There are still no buyers for the Allston building.

City of Berkeley spokesperson Mary Kay Clunies-Ross said it may be too early to say whether the postal service move from Allston will have any noted impact on the city.

“I would venture that there would be some interesting project proposed and we could get some public benefit out of whatever replaces that facility,” said Councilmember Linda Maio, whose district includes the post office and neighboring land.

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